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Nokia’s new MeeGo-based N9 is set up for failure

Nokia has unveiled an impressive new MeeGo-based handset, but the product won' …

Nokia has finally announced the long-anticipated N9 handset, the culmination of Nokia's five-step plan to deliver a mainstream Linux-based smartphone. The N9 is an impressively engineered device that is matched with a sophisticated touch-oriented interface and a powerful software stack with open source underpinnings. It's a worthy successor of the developer-centric N900, but it provides a user experience that is tailored for a mainstream audience.

The N9 is the first truly modern smartphone that Nokia has unveiled since the start of finger-friendly interface revolution. Although it's a significant technical achievement, it's sadly a pyrrhic victory for Nokia—the device has arrived a year too late. The Finnish phone giant has already abandoned its Linux platform in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system.

The N9 has a 1GHz TI OMAP Cortex A8 CPU, 1GB of RAM, a 3.9-inch AMOLED capacitive display, and an 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics. The hardware specifications aren't industry-leading, but are still respectable—especially when you consider the fact that much of the software is native code, not hampered by the resource overhead of a managed code runtime. The industrial engineering is outstanding, featuring a curved glass screen and slender polycarbonate body.

The front of the N9 has no buttons, a design decision that was made possible by the software's gesture-based interaction model. The N9 user interface, which is largely built with the open source Qt development toolkit, has a completely new look and feel. Aside from the rounded icons, it looks very different from Symbian and the Maemo interface of the N900. Nokia is calling the new user experience layer "Swipe" in reference to its emphasis on the swiping gesture. It has a very fresh and distinctive style.

There is some confusion about the exact configuration of the N9 software stack. Nokia's official marketing and PR material cite MeeGo 1.2 as the software platform, but it's actually a hybrid that is largely built on Harmattan, the legacy Maemo 6 code base that Nokia shuttered when it committed to MeeGo.

It seems sort of dubious on the surface to call the software MeeGo when it's really still Maemo, but the hybrid is apparently designed in such a way that it has full API compatibility with MeeGo 1.2. What this means is that the distinction will be little more than an implementation detail as far as users and application developers are concerned.

A closer inspection of Nokia's MeeGo strategy shows that this hybrid approach is entirely consistent with the roadmap that Espoo was espousing earlier this year.

Another major point of confusion is the relationship between the new N9 and a leaked prototype with the same name that showed up on the radar last year. The original MeeGo-based N9 prototype had a slide-out physical keyboard and was thought to be scheduled for a Q1 2011 launch. That design, which was known internally as N9-00, was dropped. The release date got pushed back as Nokia started a new keyboardless design called the N9-01, codenamed Lankku, which was likely the basis for the N9 that Nokia unveiled this week. Based on some odd images that Engadget spotted, it looks like N950—a special developer variant of the N9 that will only be available to select third-party developers—might be based on the original slide-out keyboard design.

Will it blend?

Although it appears to have a lot to offer, the N9 unfortunately won't get an opportunity to shine. Nokia's schizophrenic platform strategy and lack of long-term commitment make the device a non-starter. The new phone is a bit like the Titanic: a masterpiece of quality engineering and luxury craftsmanship that is doomed to sink on its maiden voyage. The ambiguity of MeeGo's role in Nokia's future product lineup and the company's frustrating mixed messages to third-party software developers have already set up the N9 for failure.

When the rumors first started to emerge about the possibility of Nokia adopting Windows Phone 7, I was highly skeptical. As I pointed out at the time, Nokia's MeeGo efforts were very close to producing the kind of platform that Nokia needs to be competitive. The company had effectively bet its future on MeeGo—meaning that any change at such a late stage would be borderline suicidal.

When new CEO Stephen Elop issued his now-infamous "burning platform" memo, my advice to the company was to go all-in on MeeGo and avoid the distraction of a transition to another operating system. Elop, however, had other ideas. His opinion was that MeeGo would simply take too long to deliver, whereas adopting WP7 would allow them to get a product to market with a modern operating system right away.

The fact that a compelling MeeGo device will likely launch first raises the question of whether Elop misjudged the Linux-based platform and its suitability for consumers. It's worth noting, however, that Nokia is also on track to launch its first WP7 device this year. Elop was not wrong in his contention that Microsoft's platform offered Nokia a quick path to the market.

It's likely that Elop viewed the long-term challenges of doing proper MeeGo maintenance and integration (vs. the quick-and-dirty hybrid model of the N9) as an untenable challenge for a company in Nokia's position. The decision to adopt WP7 was an exit that allowed Nokia to avoid the difficulty of advancing its own platform. The downside is that dependence on WP7 will relegate Nokia to the role of a mere hardware manufacturer. In choosing WP7, Nokia is sacrificing the kind of platform autonomy and opportunity to control its own ecosystem that it would have had with MeeGo.

Elop has said on several occasions in the past that MeeGo will remain in the background at Nokia as a research platform for future innovation, albeit with significantly reduced investment. It's not really clear what this means, but it seems fairly obvious that MeeGo doesn't have a strong strategic relevance at Nokia anymore due to the switch to Windows Phone 7. Without more clarity about the extent to which Nokia will support the platform and consumers who buy the N9, it's hard to imagine it attracting a serious mainstream audience. If Nokia doesn't treat MeeGo as a serious platform, then the N9 is simply not going to get enough traction to make it viable, especially when it comes to third-party software.

The sad part is that Nokia once had a large audience of third-party developers who were eager to support a MeeGo device. Companies like Rovio and Qik already had Qt-based ports of their applications under development specifically for Nokia's MeeGo devices. The new platform strategy has thrown the company's existing third-party developer community under a bus and has made it impractical for them to continue supporting the company's products.

If Nokia ported its open source Qt toolkit—which is supported today on MeeGo and Symbian—to WP7, it would open the door for building applications that target all three of the company's major operating systems. Unfortunately, that's just not going to happen. Elop himself rejected the possibility of Qt on WP7.

Nokia's attitude about Qt through this platform transition has been agonizingly inconsistent. During the presentation at which the N9 was unveiled, Qt was repeatedly highlighted as a critical part of Nokia's vision for mobile development. From where I'm standing, it's not at all clear how Qt can continue to be defining part of Nokia's mobile strategy when it's not even going to be supported on the company's flagship WP7 devices.

Nokia can tout the large Symbian install base as a target that makes Qt relevant in the mobile space, but that's a dead end—Sybmian will be phased out in 2014. It's not even clear now if Qt 5, scheduled for release in 2012, will even officially support Symbian. Qt is still one of the best tools available for cross-platform desktop development (and thanks to a permissive license and diverse community, the toolkit's survival is ensured in the long run irrespective of what Nokia does), but it's not officially supported today on any mainstream mobile operating system.

When I think of Nokia and its place in the market today, I'm reminded of Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and transitions. Janus is often depicted as a being with two faces pointed in opposite directions. At times, it seems like Nokia is still looking back at MeeGo as if it lies ahead and at other times the company is seemingly aimed at an unwavering path towards WP7.

The mixed messages and inconsistencies in the platform strategy are not helpful. By creating confusion about what development tools and platforms Nokia is really going to stand behind in the long-term, the company is making it impossible to have any confidence in its future plans. This is especially problematic for its first—and possibly only—MeeGo device, a compelling product with little future ahead of it.

I was gunna ask why they are still using Maemo, but the session linked seems to explain it, so I'll go read that first. Still seems odd as MeeGo has had many months (a Year?) to improve upon it's base.

"When the rumors first started to emerge about the possibility of Nokia adopting Windows Phone 7, I was highly skeptical. As I pointed out at the time, Nokia's MeeGo efforts were very close to producing the kind of platform that Nokia needs to be competitive"

Welcome to the real world. Nokia's business model has been failing. They have had to let 7,000 workers go. Their prospects for success in sustained competition with Apple, Google, and Microsoft in software development were minimal. The logic of this release likely is that they needed something to market today and the engineering of the hardware is a step forward for them. Most likely, somewhere down the road buyers of this phone will be able to upgrade its operating system to Windows Phone. Of course as we have been recently reminded by Ars, the Windows Phone 7 architecture does not seem to be Microsoft's strategic direction either.

It's a real shame. The N9 looks like a great alternative to my iPhone 4 and I would be eyeing it up come my contract renewal in December, other than the fact that I really really want a physical keyboard again on my next phone, didn't think I'd miss it. I'd even get an N950 if it didn't have a non-AMOLED screenaccording to Engadget and it was available to the general public.

Guess I'll be getting an Android or WP7 with a phsyical keyboard and high-res screen come renewal then. my choices kind of look limited though, hoping the next 6 months shoves some devices at me.

The fact that this device won't actually be MeeGo seems to justify the claims that MeeGo won't be ready quickly enough.

No, the fact that this device won't be pure MeeGo shows that this was in development well before MeeGo was ready, and was held up and stalled until now. There's no time to go back and make everything run on MeeGo as it is.

However since Qt is the target API, moving between the two shouldn't be very troublesome. But then, an attack on MeeGo is what I expect from Ars' resident Microsoft mouthpiece ;p

MeeGo 1.2 is out and quite nice. Given a vendor willing to put the time and attention into the UI they want to make available to users, they could have a high quality, vendor independent OS with solid APIs ready to go in short order.

You are right that the N9 is set up for a failure. It's been set up by Elop and Ballmer to fail.

I think you're wrong though, I don't think it will fail at all. I for one will be buying the N9 whenever it comes out. Meego looks absolutely stunning, it is Android with style, exactly what I'm looking for. If you think for one second I'm going to buy a WP7/Nokia phone you're insane. Obviously Elop has come from Microsoft to try to breath life back into 1.6% marketshare, WP7. Elop is wrecking Nokia from the inside out, Ars did you really believe Elop came to Nokia and went "Meego won't be ready until 2014, better switch to WP7 which apparently won't be ready for almost a year." Then 4 months later release the phone, completely invalidating the whole idea of it not being ready, and they have it ready and running on 2 phones!

What I will do is take the opportunity to publicly humiliate Ballmer and Elop and buy the N9 with Meego and watch it outsell his POS WP7 phone. If this phone sells it will have to be supported. Ars Technica joins Elop's spin and claims N9 dead on arrival, but the only thing DOA is WP7!

This epitomises Nokia; excellent hardware, but a complete lack of strategy with the software. Their direction seems to change weekly.

Personally, I think they'll be better off licencing WP7 and focusing on what they do best; MeeGo and Maemo might be technically interesting to a bunch of geeks who like hacking away at Linux kernels, but consumers want not just an elegant, working phone but also a thriving ecosystem, the latter of which Nokia failed to deliver in Ovi; and S60 was anything but elegant compared to Android, iOS and especially WP7.

What I don't understand is why they're pushing two different platforms. Either they should have stuck out with MeeGo and launch the N9, or they should have completely cancelled it, and announce the N9 with WP7. The situation is really crazy as it stands.

If Nokia ported its open source Qt toolkit—which is supported today on MeeGo and Symbian—to WP7, it would open the door for building applications that target all three of the company's major operating systems. Unfortunately, that's just not going to happen. Elop himself rejected the possibility of Qt on WP7.

wonky, given that Qt is specifically built to be platform agnostic. The paranoid part of my brain keeps thinking that Elop was hired to get Nokia in bed with Microsoft.

Seriously? Not only are they way too late to the party, they managed to ensure that they will be sued, too.

The other one is Swype. "Swipe" must surely be too general to be trademarked...

Also, if Nokia had Harmattan at the ready (Maemo6 core + MeeGo API + Qt), what kept them so long? And as a matter of fact, why did they waste time going after Intel(R) payola for MeeGo when they had Maemo already, a lot more adapted to mobile phones?

Moblin/Maemo/MeeGo were always on shaky ground. 1st, Intel dumps Moblin on Nokia's lap becoming Meego. Then it completely disappears from the radar. Sometime after, there are talks of QT taking over Clutter. And now this Maemo/MeeGo hybrid thingy.

wonky, given that Qt is specifically built to be platform agnostic. The paranoid part of my brain keeps thinking that Elop was hired to get Nokia in bed with Microsoft.

That thought occurs to a lot of people, and his course of action makes it hard to think otherwise. But Qt on WP7 has always been unlikely, as a platform agnostic toolkit like Qt is a threat to Microsoft and any other vendor banking on lock-in and making porting of applications difficult.

Also, if Nokia had Harmattan at the ready (Maemo6 core + MeeGo API + Qt), what kept them so long? And as a matter of fact, why did they waste time going after Intel(R) payola for MeeGo when they had Maemo already, a lot more adapted to mobile phones?

When Meego was first announced, the rationale was that the systems engineering producing the base linux distribution was getting to be more work than Nokia was interested in doing. Moving to Meego would let them focus on creating the UX, while the underlying OS work could be shared with other parties....

It's really pretty simple. Elop made the right decision for Microsoft. He obviously made a bad decision for Nokia. No hardware manufacturer of Nokia's kind has *ever* kept the kinds of margins necessary for preserving R&D without controlling the full stack up to software. And without money to afford that R&D you can't keep the innovation edge necessary for preserving your market position.

Nokia might well have failed if they kept pursuing a Meego based strategy - they definitely have an execution problem. But they *definitely* will fail even if they somehow overcome that issue and successfully execute Elop's plan. So it's a bad strategy for Nokia and a disaster for Finland.

Again, nobody has even used the device. We know nothing about it apart from what it looks like but thats it. So where is all this oohing and ahhing coming from?

For all we know the thing has a 2 hour battery life.

At least WP7 so far can be vouched for somewhat.

WP7 pre-mango is also not competitive. I think the excitement is the possibility that Nokia has something special, but clearly the excitement is limited by the knowledge that Nokia will knife this baby.

Of course, that is the attractive part about an open device. You do not NEED an app store. It can run anything. Why pay $2 for some randomly ported shit, when you have the real thing for free?

Lol. The app has to exist to run it, and apps have to be specifically written for phone interfaces to be of any value. The apps just won't be there.

We're so unfortunate to possibly not have an app store filled with $0.99 junk apps. Such a tragedy. But then, maybe to the people who might buy the N9 it really isn't that important. It certainly isn't to me, therefore such a possibility doesn't terribly concern me. If it did I wouldn't have my N900, I'd have an iPhone.

Also, if Nokia had Harmattan at the ready (Maemo6 core + MeeGo API + Qt), what kept them so long? And as a matter of fact, why did they waste time going after Intel(R) payola for MeeGo when they had Maemo already, a lot more adapted to mobile phones?

When Meego was first announced, the rationale was that the systems engineering producing the base linux distribution was getting to be more work than Nokia was interested in doing. Moving to Meego would let them focus on creating the UX, while the underlying OS work could be shared with other parties....

And it slipped their minds that the other parties were more interested in set-top boxes and in-car entertainment than mobile phones and tablets?

Again, nobody has even used the device. We know nothing about it apart from what it looks like but thats it. So where is all this oohing and ahhing coming from?

For all we know the thing has a 2 hour battery life.

At least WP7 so far can be vouched for somewhat.

WP7 pre-mango is also not competitive. I think the excitement is the possibility that Nokia has something special, but clearly the excitement is limited by the knowledge that Nokia will knife this baby.

You'll be hard pressed to find a WP7 user who isn't happy with their phone. It's not competitive from a marketing standpoint, yes. And in fact, as awesome as Mango is, if the marketing continues along the same path, Microsoft might as well Kin it.

Again, nobody has even used the device. We know nothing about it apart from what it looks like but thats it. So where is all this oohing and ahhing coming from?

For all we know the thing has a 2 hour battery life.

At least WP7 so far can be vouched for somewhat.

People have used the device, engadet has already written a semi-long article on their views with their time with the device. And what has wp7 vouched for? Having the 2nd worse UI ever (1st goes to MS bob)

It's sad to see meego go by by, I hope that some devs find a way to port the OS to android phones or some small time company starts making meego phones.

We're so unfortunate to possibly not have an app store filled with $0.99 junk apps. Such a tragedy.

Junk apps don't matter as long as the good ones are there. Filtering out the crap is a skill you need in any internet endeavor.

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But then, maybe to the people who might buy the N9 it really isn't that important. It certainly isn't to me, therefore such a possibility doesn't terribly concern me. If it did I wouldn't have my N900, I'd have an iPhone.

Your loss. Most of my time on my Android phone is spent in third party apps that won't exist in a base MeeGo environment. You may be fine with that, but it's not going to work for normal consumers.

Yeah, the 3rd party apps is what truly defines a smartphone today. I have used devices running iOS, Symbian and Android, and I really don't care about how "stylish" they are. I just want to get things done. For that, I need apps, and Nokia has NEVER succeeded in offering a good app catalog to its costumers. Nor a software experience at all. The OVI software was a pile of crap.

I wonder why they didn't use MeeGo core and instead kept the maemo core...

I'm willing to bet that the "others" that were supposed to help Nokia with kernel development have been doing it at their leisure, and Intel has bitten off more than it can chew, sending engineers across the globe to whatever company in embedded markets that would like to try MeeGo, instead of keeping them at their desks writing code..

Ars can you please explain to me why the CEO told the world the day after releasing the N9 that there would be no other devices running Meego, even if the N9 sold well? Is Nokia's strategy with Elop to NOT sell popular phones now? Why on earth wouldn't they just tell the world they would support Meego alongside WP7? All Elop had to do was tease Meego in March, tease the media with a few N9 leaks in May, build up to a conference in June, then announce the N9 and N950 running Meego, instead they went with WP7 now Nokia is worth 50% less then they were on February 11. When a CEO announces a strategy change to his former company that costs the company a 22 Billion dollar markdown in 4 months I get a teensy bit suspicious.

On top of all that he made a undisclosed deal with Microsoft to put Bing on every Nokia phone, and licensed Nokia's IP to Microsoft, who in turn will use it on WP7 and essentially give all Nokia's IP to its competitors. On top of all this they are paying to use WP7! What kind CEO when asked about a plan B says "Plan B is to make Plan A work really well"... what do you think stockholders do when they hear the CEO of Nokia say we have zero hedging strategy and we're betting everything on an ecosystem that has 1.6% marketshare. What kind of CEO would claim their biggest competitor was Android and not Samsung, LG, HTC etc. who actually sell phones, normally when a company drops their own OS they will use the most popular OS not the least popular!

On top of all of this Elop was recently an executive for Microsoft! Its not a conspiracy Ars its extremely obvious, Elop is a trojan horse!!!!!!

"Nokia's schizophrenic platform strategy and lack of long-term commitment make the device a non-starter. "Actually Nokia is finally moving away from its schitzophrenic platform strategy by commiting to WP7. They have this Meego as a last gasp or maybe even as a backup. But they, and all but the idealistic, finally realized that however nice it might be, it is going nowhere, and it just doesn't make sense to pay 7000 software engineers to develop their own orphan phone operating system.

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Most of my time on my Android phone is spent in third party apps that won't exist in a base MeeGo environment. You may be fine with that, but it's not going to work for normal consumers.

Nokia realizes that the apps are the key. People buy phones for the apps. And massive numbers of developers will write apps for iPhone, and Android, and for WP7--WP7 because the development platform is near identical to the platform for Windows--there are quite a lot of these developers.

No one wants a phone with a nice UI but none of the apps they want.

Here's an example: I was just at this big shopping mall. They had all these signs that there was a free app to let you navigate around the mall. Guess which phones had this app available? I don't even need to tell you. You already know that Symbian and Meego were not on the list. Of course! But that's the death knell for a phone operating system these days, no matter how 'good' or 'open source' or whatever.

I wonder why they didn't use MeeGo core and instead kept the maemo core...

Because this device, and the OS it runs on, has been in development for as long as MeeGo has. Before, in fact. I suspect it was much, much farther along than MeeGo, and going back to redo the upper layers on top of stock MeeGo (which only just hit 1.2) would have taken too long.

tigas wrote:

I'm willing to bet that the "others" that were supposed to help Nokia with kernel development have been doing it at their leisure

Kernel development for the N9 and MeeGo is actually a short matter, since they target upstream then backport. The board support files and drivers for the N9 have been in the upstream kernel for a long time now (see arch/arm/mach-omap2/board-rm680.c)

Kernel development is a small part of what goes into MeeGo (well, unless you're Intel adding hardware drivers.)

"When the rumors first started to emerge about the possibility of Nokia adopting Windows Phone 7, I was highly skeptical. As I pointed out at the time, Nokia's MeeGo efforts were very close to producing the kind of platform that Nokia needs to be competitive"

Welcome to the real world. Nokia's business model has been failing. They have had to let 7,000 workers go. Their prospects for success in sustained competition with Apple, Google, and Microsoft in software development were minimal. The logic of this release likely is that they needed something to market today and the engineering of the hardware is a step forward for them. Most likely, somewhere down the road buyers of this phone will be able to upgrade its operating system to Windows Phone. Of course as we have been recently reminded by Ars, the Windows Phone 7 architecture does not seem to be Microsoft's strategic direction either.

No, they DECIDED to let 7000 workers go. The Janus description was an apt one. Nokia kept doing both hardware and software, and the difference between them and apple was that they peaked early and they didn't monetize their R&D. They've CHOSEN to kill their software side, let people go, accept a billion dollar payment from MS and kill a software ecosystem in Europe that could have had a future.

I don't think they overreacted (Meego is clearly behind), except that they gave up too early on software. Android would have allowed them more freedom to release devices with QT frameworks, custom software stores and the like. Who cares about sunk costs, it would have allowed real differentiation and the cultivation/continuation of their own 3rd party ecosystem. I suspect Elop acted the way he did because he can direct his own company easier with fewer people, fewer 3rd parties and more money. Look at his 'burning platform' memo. CEOs never rock the boat like that. That was a huge knock on his own company, but it made sense to knock troublesome employees and Finnish politicians into place. It was a Machiavellian move to consolidate power as an outsider. Create a big, bad wolf enemy that requires extreme action to defeat.

I honestly don't like their chances. Becoming another commodity hardware maker is obviously stupid. Unless they merge with MS, they should move Maemo/QT to tablets and try for a greatness they might still have in Europe. Then abandon the MS contract as soon as possible. Otherwise, they're a Finnish Motorola, too small to be really successful, too large and proud to be acquired, where one wrong move can mean death or dismemberment.